Organic saffron over the flavor of bullshit

Most of our big media pundits are worse than useless.  They are actively contributing to the decay of America into banana Republicanism.

They are lazy- Reading the commentary from Sullivan and Brooks and Klein and others, aside from being completely wrong, what stood out to me was how simply predictable it was, regurgitating the coalescing villager CW about Ryan: The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!

Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work. Better to roll with the conventional wisdom, churn out a load of bullshit, and when confronted by people that you are wrong, have a hissy fit about the hard left, whine about being picked on and someone using four letter words and capital letters, and dig in. Instead of absorbing what people are telling you, link to the National Review and McMegan, and don’t even bother to figure out basic math such as 22-18. There is a word for this behavior- it is lazy. These guys are on autopilot, have their narrative, and they are sticking to it.

The story of an angry reader

Shorter David Brooks: My poor fantasy life with a thin gloss of convenient interpretation justifies my continued living in a fantasy world while you live as undeserving peasants.

In other words, in school, [a character named Ben] labored when others didn’t. At work, he sacrificed when others didn’t. He bought a house he could afford when others didn’t.

Ben, whom Brooks doesn't bother to report, but asks us to imagine! Who gives every indication of being no more than a figment of Brooks's weekend-bound imagination.

Wildlife biologists often have to parse through animal scat to determine diet and health of the animals they study. If I had limitless time, I could peel away the feces Brooks has put on paper to its awful, inane content. Except that he's engaged in coprophagia, and he expects us to eat and enjoy bullshit just as he has.

I'll tell you what really steams me: Brooks gets paid New York shitloads of money to make up bullshit like this. He doesn't even have to pretend to look for what's true. He can write down whatever would be convenient for him - for his weekend plans, for his lazy desire to have an early dinner, for his ideology, for his vanity of deserving.

If I ran the New York Times, I'd fire Brooks's lazy, undeserving, no-account ass. Let him stop pretending to know the pulse of real people. Let him work his contacts for another easy, well-paid sinecure from which he can pretend to stand for working people everywhere - a pretense he makes while defending established wealth.

Money-changers in the temple

... only this temple is the temple of democracy. Glenn Greenwald links to billmon's diary on Kos (how did I miss that billmon is baack!):

What I was really wondering is how the American elites could feel so confident in their own entrenched positions that they could so blatantly ignore or defy reality -- as illustrated by the two Washington Post stories juxtaposed above.

The answer, I suppose is either that they have lived so long in the bubble of power and privilege that they no longer realize that moments like July 1789 or October 1917 can happen, or that they are supremely confident that populist rage can always be channeled to the right, where it can be easily controlled.

Either way, it amounts to the same thing: A total unawareness that at the end of the day, the only thing standing between them and the guillotine is sheer social inertia.

The elites do think that they are in charge of our inertia, that their conscious efforts succeed at making most of us into sheeple.

Click image for Wikimedia Commons public domain claim.

Charm

... doesn't necessarily require affection.

If Obama can smile while Maureen Dowd gossips fripperies in that awful voice of hers, if he can be anywhere in the vicinity of William Kristol and David Brooks without crinkling his nose from the stench, he can deal with the bluffs and confidentialities of politics, foreign and domestic.

Rachel Maddow, on the other hand, would be worth talking to.

Democrats who don't dirty their hands with politics

Democracy requires more than one party or at least more than one faction. In Massachusetts, we've managed to do o.k. with schisms within the Democratic Party, even now that we have a Democratic governor for the first time in nearly two decades.

Much of the South has two conservative parties. It's hard to see how that's better for democracy.

In any case, I think Democrats are less dangerous in unified government than Republicans. The reason is that Democrats are more fractious and prone to dissent, even from each other. Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill butted heads, for example.

David Brooks's Republicans who "hate" Duhbya nonetheless keep their mouths shut in public. They follow the corporate model, where direction flows from the top and fealty is required for continued membership. (This looks like leadership, but it's often really just coercion.)

I'll worry about the Democrats becoming unbeatably dominant when they show the slightest understanding that they need to be in politics before they get to do governance. Right now, I don't see them coalescing around a pointed message that distinguishes them from the Bushists.

The very least they should be doing is forcing the Republicans to obstruct popular law every week. The Dems need to make their opponents pay a political price for thwarting the will of the people. To do this, they should have a consistent media narrative that they repeat over and over and over and over again until the media can remember it. But despite the last 25 years of Republican PR and propaganda techniques as an example, they can't seem to manage that.